These numbers suggest that law schools will have a total of somewhere
between 52,000 and 53,000 applicants to choose from in this cycle, i.e.,
slightly more than half as many as in 2004, when there were 188 ABA
accredited law schools (there are 201 at the moment, with an emphasis on
"at the moment").

To put that number in perspective, law schools admitted 60,400 first year JD students two years ago.
Since a significant percentage of applicants are unwilling to consider
enrolling at any school below a certain hierarchical level, and/or will
decline to enroll at certain other schools without receiving massive
discounts on the advertised tuition price, these numbers portend fiscal
calamity for more than a few schools. But out of that calamity will come
the beginnings of a more rational and just system of legal education
for the next generation of lawyers.

Comments

Skeptics who continue to deny that legal academia suffers from real problems are increasingly irrelevant.

Posted by: Brian Tamanaha | Dec 13, 2012 1:58:52 PM

Law schools suffer from a simple problem: they are now required (*finally*)to make basic information about REAL employment outcomes available to consumers.

You know you're running a questionable enterprise when the response to basic consumer information is abstention from buying your product. All those 170 LSAT scoring folks get it.

And it's telling that Tamanaha's peers would rather poo poo his attempts to conceive of solutions to save the enterprise instead of acknowledging the obvious unsustainability of the current model and offering up viable substantive alternatives of their own.